An editing colleague put me on to Karen Elizabeth Gordon’s quirky book years ago, and I often dip into it. Grammar with drama and a touch of goth…

The verb is the heartthrob of a sentence. Without a verb, a subject would be abandoned, stranded in a sentence, incapable of sensing the void. There would be nothing between words but meaningless space or a clutter of adjectives, phrases, and pronouns, and maybe something to eat, but no way to reach for it or bite it, since action and feeling are missing.